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Gadgets, Reviews, Tricks and MoreMon, 02 Mar 2015 00:22:19 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/woikrhttps://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with The Free DictionarySubscribe with Bitty BrowserSubscribe with Live.comSubscribe with Excite MIXSubscribe with WebwagSubscribe with Podcast ReadySubscribe with WikioSubscribe with Daily RotationHuawei Announces the Best Looking Android Smartwatch Yethttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/woikr/~3/6UQ2t1MryIg/
http://woikr.com/news/huawei-announces-the-best-looking-android-smartwatch-yet/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 00:22:19 +0000http://woikr.com/?p=9675Huawei has announced its Android smartwatch at the Mobile World Congress and it is the best looking android a yet. Huawei claims that they surveyed various potential customers and based on their feedbck of the current smartwatch options in the market, they have come up with one that looks like a luxury watch and caters to what people are looking for in a smartwatch.

The watch has a round display and comes with some beautiful watchfaces which does give it the sophisticated look of a luxury watch. It works with Google Now to let you issue voice commands.

Here is how the watch looks:

Yup that dial is a beautiful watch face rendered on the screen. The watch sports 4GB storage, 512MB RAM and a Qualcomm 1.2 GHz processor.

The service is being run as a pilot project in 12 Indian cities – Agra, Alwar, Ambala, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Mathura, Muzzafarnagar, New Delhi, Pathankot, Vapi, Bharuch and Vadodara and is only available to passengers travelling in trains which do not have apntry car.

To avail this service, passengers will need to make a meal booking via IRCTC’s e-Catering service (ecatering.irctc.co.in, 1800-1034-139 (Toll-free), 0120-4383892-99 (Toll) or SMS MEAL to 139) using their PNR number. Given that these pizzas have been added as standard menu items to the e-Catering menu, all the standard rules of the e-Catering service apply to this service as well.

Pebble – the company which built the first usable smartwatch has announced its next flagship product. Pebble Time – a next generation pebble with a colored screen and a redesigned operating system is now available via kickstarter.

Pebble started its journey with a successfully funded kickstarted campaign and has never looked back. They surely did not need another kickstarted campaign to get this project funded, but I guess they did this in nostalgia. The project surpassed its funding goal within 17 minutes of going live on kickstarter.

The new watch is thiner than its predecessors and has a curved design to better fit on your wrist. It also fits on most 22mm watch bands – so you are not limited to what the company offers.

The new interface follows a timeline approach to display information. You scroll forward or backward in time to get the info you need – whether its that score of the just ended game you want to check or the weather in the city you are traveling tomorrow.

The watch will ship in May 2015 at a retail price of $199. Kickstarter backers can get it at a reduced price of $159 (gone as of this writing) and $179 (going fast). There are distributer level tiers also available for anyone who wants to buy them in bulk.

Apple Pay is a revolutionary payment system. I have used it a couple of times since it has launched and just love the way it has been implemented. It works just as it was shown in the keynote. You basically bring your iPhone close to the payment terminal which is waiting for payment and your cards stored in the passbook will automagically appear on your screen. If you have your finger already on the Touch ID, it would just go ahead and authorize the payment with your default card. The little chime and a subtle vibration in addition to the short animation on the screen let you know that the payment was authorized.

More and more banks and financial institution have been joining the Apple Pay bandwagon since its launch. Its like the next big thing (pun intended). And Apple’s master plan of letting banks promote the technology is working out well. We see more ads from banks for this thing than we see from Apple. Why? Because its super secure. And all banks want a payment system which is super secure. It will massively cut down on their fraud detection budget. I was impressed to see that every bank has a dedicated Apple Pay helpline to help customers activate their cards over Apple Pay. People say that Apple should have added NFC to previous iPhone versions as well. But if you think about it, they launched the iPhone 5S with just the Touch ID sensor in order to test its usability and gather usage patterns and data. They perfected the key piece of the puzzle before getting into the game.

But Apple Pay is the beginning of what the NFC technology in the iPhone can do. It is going to be the poster boy of what Apple is going to do with NFC, but there are several other awesome things that can be done. Imagine checking into your hotel room from an app on your phone and getting the NFC based soft key delivered to your phone. With contactless locks, you can directly head to your room and open it by just bringing your phone close to the lock. NFC also has massive potential to replace regular cards. Think transit passes and starbucks gift cards. All of these can be stored on your iPhone and used with next gen hardware. And since everything is authorized by your fingerprint, its super secure. And you can certainly rely on Apple to deliver the simplest implementation possible. The mere ability of the phone to wake up and spring up your cards when its brought closer to the payment terminal is the epitome of intuitiveness.

The potential is huge and I am sure a dedicated team of creative + engineering is right now working at Cupertino to design protocols and workflows to make that a reality. This is why Apple is succeeding where other have failed. Apple not only delivered the technology, they also designed a very efficient and secure way to make it work. The Apple Pay system is being praised by various security firms as one of the most secure payment systems yet. If Apple can design systems with the same level of security, efficiency & ease of use for other NFC potentials, the impact is going to be huge.

There are few glitches of course. Like with any new technology, adoption is one of the biggest challenges Apple Pay is facing. And I am not talking about consumer adoption. Apple is covered there. There are enough people in the world now to buy whatever Apple makes and make it a successful product. The real challenge is making merchants to invest in new equipments which support the payment system. Most merchants in the developed countries have the contactless payment enabled terminals installed. But there is still a big chunk of small to medium scale merchants which use the old swipe terminals and will not upgrade unless there is a new regulation in place or they see some irresistible deal which makes the investment worth. I am talking about those neighborhood stores which do not belong to a big chain. These are individually/family owned businesses which form a big part of our daily transactions. Apple is relying on the banks to do this job as well.

Apple Pay is being advertised as a replacement for your wallet. Well, you don’t only keep your money (paper or plastic) in your wallet. There are 10 other things. Granted that those membership cards can be added to Passbook in future and, well, what better place to keep your kids’ photos than an album on your iPhone? But still, think about payment transactions in places like restaurants & gas stations. Not all restaurants have those fancy wireless payment terminals which the waiters can carry to your desk (although they are becoming increasingly popular in countries where EMV chip based cards are mandated). Also, mobile phones are generally not encouraged to be used at gas stations as the batteries can ignite the fumes coming out of gasoline. And what about those quarters you keep to pay for street parking? Not all cities have meters with card readers, much less contactless card readers.

But even with all these hiccups, Apple Pay is going to succeed and is here to stay. Even if Apple does not come up with any of the other NFC based use cases, it is still a super awesome contactless payment system which will give you a short adrenaline kick every time you use it. And that’s what we live for, right?

The Rashtrapati Bhavam Museum in India is now offering online reservation for booking tickets in advance. The ticket prices starts from INR 25 per visitor. There are discounted rates for larger groups and school children. Also, accompanying children under 12 years of age enter free.